Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[James Bottomley]

On Fri, 2021-06-18 at 16:28 +0200, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 18, 2021 at 4:11 PM James Bottomley
> <James.Bottomley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Fri, 2021-06-18 at 16:46 +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> > > For workshop or brainstorming types of sessions, the highest
> > > barrier to participation for remote attendees is local attendees
> > > not speaking in microphones. That's the number one rule that
> > > moderators would need to enforce, I think all the rest depends on
> > > it. This may require a larger number of microphones in the room
> > > than usual.
> > 
> > Plumbers has been pretty good at that.  Even before remote
> > participation, if people don't speak into the mic, it's not
> > captured on the recording, so we've spent ages developing protocols
> > for this. Mostly centred around having someone in the room to
> > remind everyone to speak into the mic and easily throwable padded
> > mic boxes.  Ironically, this is the detail that meant we couldn't
> > hold Plumbers in person under the current hotel protocols ... the
> > mic needs sanitizing after each throw.
> 
> What about letting people use the personal mic they're already
> carrying, i.e. a phone?

Well, you can already in our hybrid plan:  BBB works on a phone as a
web app, so you'd appear in the conference as a remote attendee even
though you're sitting in the room.  However, not everyone's phone will
run the app, so we still need the throwable solution.

The main problem with using this method is that you're going to have to
mute the phone speaker output to prevent audio feedback, but I'm sure
we'll only get that wrong a few times before people work it out ...

James